J o s e p h C h a r m o n t , La Renaissance du droit naturel (Montpellier 1910), p . 5. 49 The categories in which Saleilles framed the later expressions of his views give some indication as to how his position came to shift. As we have seen, he had previously been concerned to establish the relevance of historical methods in the field of private law, one of his purposes being to demonstrate that the law faculties were fit for the introduction of the political sciences into the syllabus. The assumption was that, whereas private law had often been pursued in blissful ignorance of the connections between legal institutions and the social environment in which they were located, it was impossible to conceive of public law scholarship founded on a similar ignorance.

Hobbes, by contrast, did; though it was in the following century that that notion was first explicitly articulated by thinkers such as Mandeville, Montesquieu and Adam Smith. The modern idea of the state — we might even say, the modern problem of the state - is logically dependent upon the idea of a causal social order, and exists in tension with it. Conceptually, this point is fundamental to this study. In the eighteenth century - so we have just seen - the idea of society as a causal order was formulated; but it was the nineteenth century that properly ' discovered' the science of society.